Japanese entrepreneurs hold talks with Hu Jintao

TOKYO—Japanese business leaders secretly visited China last month for rare talks with President Hu Jintao on bilateral economic relations as tensions escalate between the two Asian powers, reports say.
Hiroshi Okuda, head of Japan’s most powerful business lobby, the Japan Business Federation, held talks with Hu in Beijing on September 30, Jiji Press and other media said, citing unnamed sources close to the matter.
The discussions are believed to have touched on the potential economic fallout from Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s annual visits to a war shrine seen by China and other Asian nations as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism. Koizumi’s latest visit on Monday, some two weeks after the discussions, again outraged Japan’s neighbors.
The talks between Okuda — who is also chairman of Toyota Motor, a major investor in China — and Hu came just four days after he made a separate visit to Beijing for talks with Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.
A Chinese economic official warned Thursday that Koizumi’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors 2.5 million Japanese war dead, including infamous war criminals, was likely to hurt bilateral economic and trade relations.
“There is no doubt that if the two countries do not get along it will affect the economic and trade relationship between them,” said National Bureau of Statistics spokesman Zheng Jingping. Japanese companies are ploughing billions of yen into production facilities in China, with Toyota recently announcing it would boost engine production in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
Japanese firms appear undaunted by escalating bilateral tensions including mass protests in China earlier this year over Tokyo’s approval of a history textbook that Beijing said downplayed Japan’s past atrocities The Japan Business Federation, or Nippon Keidanren, has refrained from criticising Koizumi’s latest visit to Yasukuni. No one at the organization was immediately available for comment Saturday.
The visit appeared “private in nature, just like visits by other people in the public, after careful considerations were given to domestic situations and international relations,” it said in a statement after Monday’s visit.
But the Japan Association of Corporate Executives urged Koizumi to “fully recognize that the visits have triggered resentment in neighboring countries and could hurt our country’s national interest”.—Agencies